I met Madelaine Gins at the 2012 architect’s Steven Holl’s Christmas Party in his loft offices overlooking the Hudson River and Penn Station railroad tracks We bumped into each other hanging coats on the hallway coat racks.
We got along instantly and exchanged contact information. She was especially interested in the fact that I lived in East Hampton.
In March she called and invited me to visit her East Hampton home located in Springs New York she designed with Arakawa called the “Bioscleave House” . She treated me to lunch at Babette’s on Newtown Lane I. East Hampton. We became. fast friends and this was one of the many visits, luncheon’s and artist’s& architecture salon’s we had .
The above pictures were taken after a luncheon with Vito Acconci and his new wife, Maria, a few local architects myself and one of her associates.
Madeleine often asked my financial advice especially about the lofty storage fees she was paying to maintain Arakawa’s work in state of the art facilities in New Jersey as he had quit painting in 1990 to focus his energies on the Foundation.
She never disclosed the fact that she was terminally ill during our years of friendship. Besides the springs, I visited her at her loft and studio on Houston Street met her assistants and associates at the Reversable Destiny Foundation.
Arakawa and Gins were artists from 1960’s and built this house in East Hampton as proof that living with too much comfort was catastrophic to the human condition. They built buildings that thought that humans should live in a perpetual state of instability. They felt that right angels, an absence of symmetry and a constant shifting of elevations would stimulate the immune system, sharpen the mind and lead to immortality.
The bumpy floor made of compacted earth and the intensely colored walls were meant to be hard to live with, thus prolonging life. This was the only project build in the United States and no one lived there on a full time basis.
Gins died a year later of cancer.
Carin H Constant 